Tornadoes wreck homes around South

WETUMPKA, Ala. – Tornadoes damaged numerous homes, destroyed a fire station, briefly trapped people in a grocery store and ripped the roof off an apartment complex in Mississippi, while two people died as a tree crunched their mobile home in Alabama, authorities said Wednesday.

The National Weather Service had warned that strong twisters capable of carving up communities over long distances were possible as the storm front moved eastward from Texas. They were fueled by record high temperatures and threatened a stretch of the United States where more than 25 million people live.

The “threat for supercells capable of all severe hazards continues” near the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Georgia, forecasters said. A total of 73 tornado warnings and 120 severe thunderstorm warnings were issued from Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday morning, said Matthew Elliott, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

Two people were killed in the Flatwood community just north of the city of Montgomery. “They were in their home that was struck by a tree due to the tornado,” said Christina Thornton, director of the Montgomery County Emergency Management Agency.

Thornton said others in the area were injured, and search-and-rescue crews were able to check all the houses in the area by Wednesday morning. The sheriff ’s office said a shelter was being opened at a nearby church for the affected residents.

In the west Alabama town of Eutaw, video from WBMA-TV showed large sections of the roof missing from an apartment complex, displacing 15 families in the middle of the night.

“We’ve got power lines, trees just all over the road,” Eutaw Police Chief Tommy Johnson told WBRC-TV. “In the morning when we get a little daylight, we’re going to do a door-by-door search.”

A suspected tornado damaged numerous homes during the night in Hale County, Alabama, where the emergency director said more than a third of the people live in vulnerable mobile homes.